cloudforma

Studio Theodore Spyropoulos

Tutors Mostafa El-Sayed, Apostolos Despotidis, Aleksandar Bursac

Team Al-Eryany Oula, Drayiou Daphne, Huang Yuji, Huang Yunyu

CloudForma establishes a symbiotic relationship between climate and resources. Beyond engineering, architecture, and infrastructure the project is about treating physical phenomena in their technological capacities and setting up cloud formations as an infrastructural network.

In its solid, liquid, and gaseous forms, water is a fundamental element of our being – vital and transformative as it is. Although currently dominant, water is finite. The world’s dramatic transformations during the modern era provided us with massive infrastructural works aspiring to tame water. However, these mega-projects are now being denounced as they fall into decay and obsolescence.

Looking closely at the elemental aspect of water, we focus on its unique capacity to change properties that, in turn, allows its continuous movement around the earth. Clouds are nature’s distinct way to manage water around the globe.

CloudForma harnesses the cloud as an infrastructure where wind and atmosphere become a medium of their control. Beyond the fixed and finite resource management strategies, water delivery, water management, and water resourcing are addressed as an augmentation of natural systems.

The augmented weather system employs machine learning strategies to facilitate a feedback loop with the environment. By engineering the tipping points that trigger cloud formation, aerosol-agents perform as scaffolding elements promoting condensation in areas where humidity levels allow it. When clouds start to form transport-agents promote cloud growth by dropping the temperature and through a choreography that directs the cloud to the place of release. Throughout the entire design research, opportunities and speculations were seized as a result of both the physical and digital tests. The experiments involved a thorough understanding of the parameters that influence the behaviour of the cloud.

To uncover the invisible, we propose a hybridised ecology between humans and infrastructure. The cloud’s absolute ephemerality challenges the laws of stability and solidity. In our project the architectural design resists “form” or “shape.” It is a design that regulates the very substance of water, artificially reproducing a natural phenomenon that emphasises our connection with the physical resources in the most primal sense.